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Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog in English) is a surrealist short film (16 min.) by Luis Buñuel (Writer/Director) and Salvador Dalí.
Produced in France in 1928 it both stems from and criticizes the French avant-garde film movement of the time.
Keeping with avant-garde form the film is a series of apparently unrelated, at times offensive scenes that attempt to shock the film's viewers. On the other hand, the film breaks from avant-garde tradition by focusing on content as well as on cinematic form: surprising camera angles, film "tricks", etc.
The film opens with a scene in which a woman's eye is slit by a razor, and continues with a series of surreal scenes - a woman pokes at a severed hand in the street with her cane, a man drags two grand pianos containing dead and rotting donkeys (Salvador Dalí) plays the priest in this scene), the tablets of the Ten Commandments and live priests, a man's hand has a hole in the palm from which ants emerge, a woman's armpit hair attaching itself to a man's face.
The chronology of the film is disrupted jumping from "once upon a time" to "eight years later" etc. The same characters, an unidentified "man" and "woman" recur throughout.
Critics have suggested that Un chien andalou can be understood as a typically Buñuelian anti-bourgeois, anticlerical piece.
For instance, the man dragging a piano, donkey and priests being deciphered to mean that the man's progress towards his goal is hindered by the baggage of conventional society which he is forced to bear.
In 1960, a soundtrack was added to this film at the direction of Luis Buñuel. He used the same music which was played (using phonograph records) at the 1929 screenings - extracts from "Liebestod" from Richard Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde" and two Argentinian tangos.
Another interesting thought is that the slicing of the eye in the opening scene can be understood as Buñuel "attacking" the films viewers (Buñuel himself plays the man wielding the razor, the eye is actually that of a dead goat).
The film is heavily referenced in the Pixies' song "Debaser".
During his 1976 tour, rock star and icon David Bowie used this film as his 'opening' act.
Esthero's music video for "Heaven Sent" draws heavily from the imagery of this film.
External links
- IMDb (http://us.imdb.com/Details?0020530)
- About Buñuel (http://www.1worldfilms.com/luis_bunuel.htm)
- Trivia (http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0020530/trivia)
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